Roger Ridley's base track for Ben E. King's Stand By Me was played over by musicians all over the world
I’ve come across Playing for Change’s videos a few times in different sessions of stream-of-consciousness-type web-browsing. Aside from admiring the rawness and talent of the musicians who played and the wonderful recording done by the guys who produced the video, I thought that this was a brilliant idea. To me, music as a form of communication is essentially unsurpassed in its ability to cross languages and cultures (though some cultural differences, especially in taste, do exist). Music, as Susan Langer says is a non-discursive language representing virtual feeling. Since there is no need for translation of rhythm, pitch or tamber, and humans, as emotional beings, feel, there is certain universality to this sound-in-time we call music.
In the late 90s World music exploded onto the classical music scene in part, it is my belief, because new works in the traditional European art music style were unable to stir audiences to be passionate about classical music (see declining attendance of concerts & aging listener base). What occurred was the rise of great modern composers like Osvoldo Golijov who wrote music that reflected on their culture and other composers like Philip Glass who wrote world music based on a philosophical premise. This is different from composers in the past like Bela Bartok, or Kodaly who took folk themes from their native culture but focused more on transposing them into their modern(ist) aesthetic.
The problem I find with this new world music (aside from the fact that there are a bunch of gringos jumping on the bandwagon and replicating stereotyped effects) is that by transplanting other culture’s music into the formal classical setting it is really just the same exportation or importation of an ontological world without any real unification of a common human element.
Playing for Change does have the musicians from all over the world play western pop music, but the fusion of musicians with what probably amounts to scant training in western (it can be argued that western music has been exported around the world so much that everyone ends up trained in it though) is what I feel world music creation should be about. Clearly every musician recorded on that track understands the feeling that Ben E. King intended to evoke in Stand By Me, otherwise they would have failed to create such an awe-inspiring performance. This collaboration between different musicians seems to be more inline with the one of the fundamental ideas behind world music, where we demonstrate that music is a language that needs no translation.